


in sin and error pining

by liraels



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Christmas, F/F, deep dive eve pov, holiday fic, it's a bit self destructive but who isn't, post 3x08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28056633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liraels/pseuds/liraels
Summary: It’s the panic that comes with expectation, that’s the problem, rising in her chest like oil on water. These perfect, golden things like Christmas lights and snow-white Prague and quaint little market stalls and Villanelle’s fingers curling around Eve’s wrist – and the instinct is to toss them away. Rend deep, screeching holes through them, quickly, quickly. Before they rot her teeth, before the goodness starts to hurt.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 44
Kudos: 135





	in sin and error pining

**Author's Note:**

> title is from O Holy Night, the best ever Christmas carol (but only when Delta Goodrem sings it). the runner-up title was ‘closure’, because ms swift is a war criminal - though any evermore parallels are entirely coincidental, because i wrote this like two weeks ago. the world works in mysterious ways
> 
> happy holidays to all of you, especially to those spending this time grieving, or alone.

That’s the thing about choices. They only feel permanent after you’ve made them.

This is... _inconvenient_ , if you'd call ruining your own life an inconvenience. It’s inconvenient in the way that chronic insomnia and getting fired by your own aunt and wanting to die on the odd occasion, just to follow through on all the other means you've used to destroy yourself, is inconvenient.

It's also a pretty basic truth, yes, Eve is aware. There are gaps in her education, okay? How she’s supposed to make up a functioning human being like this, Eve doesn’t know, not with all the gaps in her head, a gap where her heart should be. She’s basically see-through at this point – at least Niko could see through her, eventually. Good for him.

Eve thought Villanelle might see through her, too, and it’s never fun being wrong. Walking away from her was like walking the plank until Eve reminded herself the gallows were _behind_ her, going in the opposite direction. And going. And going.

Who craves the rope, anyway? _Crazy_. Crazed. Craven. That’s Eve.

And that’s that.

As it turns out, that last look on the bridge wasn’t Eve’s last glimpse of Villanelle, but maybe this is: a note. That same night, crinkled on Eve’s pillow, rough handwritten curl playing partner to a whispered fragment of perfume. It’s the same breaking-and-entering act as the last time.

Eve wonders what would have happened if, instead of aimlessly wandering the streets – crossing Tower Bridge again, twice more, trying to walk in between the lines – she had gone straight home. If she had answered her doorbell and accepted this message by hand, from its writer.

She wonders why.

The note reads: _HOPE IT STOPS_.

It won’t stop, but Eve knew that already.

Maybe she was hoping Villanelle would run after her, like she always does. Sure, there was that one time Villanelle chased her with a bullet instead, but Eve is mostly over that, and she was _waiting_. For a call on the wind, a tap on the shoulder, a phone call. Something.

 _Take, take, take_ , and one day there’ll be nothing left. Eve thinks of a tree, a gift, an apple, some fragment from her school days or something her father read to her, she can’t remember. But that was a story; Eve has only the disparate shreds of her life. And that story had a moral – what is the moral here? Don’t chase, but don’t run away. Don’t fight too hard but never submit. Don’t be Eve Polastri.

And half Eve’s life is over, why would she start learning these lessons now? Villanelle isn’t the sea, or the wind, or any force of nature – and she can’t be expected to wear away on Eve’s rocks like this, day after day. She’s just a person.

So Eve goes home, goes to bed, goes to sleep. Wakes up in the morning with her hand between her legs and then takes a hot shower in disgust, hot enough to burn off the crust in her eyes. Hot enough to resurrect the ghost of the last intimate touch she’s had since…she doesn’t want to talk about it.

She spends the morning on Indeed and the afternoon at the laundromat, watching her life spin and slump, spin and slump in those violent stop-start rhythms. She has a new job by Friday – an office job, the kind of job that likes her MI5 credentials even if she can’t explain the year-long gap in her resume. The job isn’t important but it gets her out of the house, at least, so now she’s spending her days fielding emails and over-interested co-workers and that’s marginally better than contemplating her hands for hours on end; open and fist, open and fist.

It would be nice to hold onto something, for once.

She can’t stop fucking _thinking_ , is the thing.

The note. It all comes back to the note – why leave it? Why risk it? Just another breadcrumb, another tantalising taste for Eve to lap up? Or was it goodbye – an ending, a promise sealed in ink?

She thinks of the piles of letters Villanelle wrote to Anna – the script neat, but the words sprawling for all the teenage heart stuffed into them. Villanelle is briefer, these days. But no less cutting.

Eve kept the note. Of course she kept it; tucked between the pages of a book on her bedside table. And now she slips it out and presses it to her mattress, stretching out the wrinkles. There’s not much to it, just a scrap of hotel paper – The Ritz, obviously – and a familiar scribble in pen. All capitals.

But why leave it – wasn’t the act of leaving enough?

She stares and stares, flips the paper upside down and back-to-front, holds it up to the light, even shades it in with light pencil. What does she think she’ll find, a clue? A reason? Something to stop this _fucking ending_ , something to say _this isn’t it_ and _it isn’t over_ , because if this really is it, the end, then she doesn’t think she’ll ever know what to do with herself again, not for one single day, one night, not ever. And it must be wishful thinking, clawing for a past that was always beyond her and a present she was so quick to discard.

But – hold on. In the bold hotel letterhead…almost impossible to see, scratched in so small with a pen the same colour as the printed ink, Eve sees it only when tilted to the light at just the right angle…

Always another secret, of course. First an unassuming lure, then a mean fishhook. This time, it’s numbers. A telephone number, curved and pointed to catch on the soft flesh behind Eve's teeth.

Eve stares. She stares and stares and she searches for the trick, the trap in it. Because there must _be_ one. There must be something.

This night is a stupid, stupid night. It is only November and yet the inhabitants of the house across the street from Eve’s flat apparently fancy themselves some Christmas-light Instagram-celebrity. The curtains have always been thin, but she didn’t tend to mind the soft glow from the lamp out front, nor the occasional blare of light from passing cars. The casual, almost calming bustle of outer London never troubled her.

But this – this is _unnatural_.

It is Eve's first Christmas out of the house she shared with Niko, and she will be spending it with a pillow over her face to block the obnoxiousness outside her window. It’s like she can hear it, somehow, even around the pillow. The endless throb of the lights – gold red green and white in shameful, dizzying cacophony.

She’s worried she might suffocate herself with the pillow – accidentally on purpose – and so discards it, resigning herself to a night without sleep. The lights are more disorientating with her eyes closed, like she’s watching them through a cloud or from inside a womb. Claustrophobic. So, eyes drooping open, she tries to look without seeing.

Colours flash and bleed across the carpet, turning a red-wine stain into a backdrop for their antics. It’s almost hypnotising. A candy-coloured contrast to the messy butchery that is the inside of Eve’s skull.

When she sleeps – because she does sleep, eventually, though it might be with her eyes wide open – she either dreams or she doesn’t. And if she dreams, it’s either about Villanelle or it isn’t. And if it’s about Villanelle, she’s painted in the desperation of primary colours, the warm flash of lights, and she swims in Eve’s head like jelly.

As autumn shrinks outside her window, pierced only by those damn Christmas lights, Eve ponders the immutable. The inescapable.

 _You see_ , she thinks to the world in miserable justification, _it’s like…an infection_. It’s like Eve was just born predisposed. A natural defect called obsession, or foolishness, or whatever disease it is where she can only get off when she thinks about a certain person’s thighs beneath her fingers. Whatever. It doesn’t matter what they call it; it isn’t Eve’s fault.

The truth of it is: walking away doesn’t help. Reality is a cold shock, ice spike to the brain. It doesn’t help. It was never going to help.

There’s one thing that might.

And so this is mostly involuntary, what she does next. She picks up her phone and – she’s memorised the number, damn you – she dials.

One, two, three rings. Then a soft click and –

“Oh.” The sound like a sigh, like a fucking hook behind Eve’s ribs. Damn it.

“Who is this?“ Eve starts quickly, getting in first. It’s like street fighting, right? First punch in, then she’ll have the game advantage. That’s definitely how phone calls work.

“ _Eve_.”

“Eve?” Eve repeats, then wonders if she could have possibly said anything stupider in this moment. Concludes that she could indeed have done worse – there are a few _I love_ _you_ s that Eve is glad she didn’t deliver, and instead suffered on the receiving end. Case in point.

“Villanelle,” says Villanelle, and there’s an audible smile in it. “Not Eve; this is Villanelle. _You_ are the Eve.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s more than one Eve out there.”

Villanelle scoffs, staticky over the phone line. “Don’t blaspheme.”

“I can’t believe I’m…“ Eve has to press a hand to her chest, pushing hard until her heartbeat thuds in the heel of her palm. “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“That I –“ _Wish I’d turned around_. “That I would call.”

“I didn’t.”

Now, that’s a lie. Everything is a lie, all of it, now why did Eve make this call again?

“I’ve been thinking about you,” Villanelle breathes out. Eve swears she breathes it in, it burns down her throat. “See, I’ve been trying to be less monstrous, and – “

“ _Monstrous_?” Ever dramatic.

“Yes. Less monstrous, and more beautiful. Like you.”

Eve can’t help but laugh, humourless. “That’s nothing like me.”

“Your monster _is_ beautiful.”

And when did they start being honest with each other? It’s jarring, a conversational car crash. Eve refuses to dignify the truth with a reply.

“Come to me,” says Villanelle, like a revelation. “That is why you’ve called? Will you come?”

“Where is it?” Eve asks, because _where are you_ seems too personal, too much like admitting something. She’s baring her chest enough by even making this call, anything more might kill her. She’s had experience in that area – and this whole thing is starting to feel like what they say madness is, bashing her head against a wall over and over again and expecting her skull not to split open this time.

Villanelle tells her. Then: “So you will come?” Her voice cracks – does it? Or did Eve imagine it?

Eve isn’t sure what she says right then, before ending the call, but it must sound like yes.

The airport is tinkling, blinking, bustling with the beginnings of the holiday crowd. Smiling travellers either accompanied by their family or thinking of them. Eve can’t remember the last time she spent the holidays with her mother – it was Poland the year before last, with Niko’s parents. And this last Christmas they spent at home, just the two of them. Something about turkey sandwiches and home-delivered Fireball, drunk on the couch.

Remembering Niko is a brutal chore, and one she prefers to avoid. One year later, and what is Eve doing? Spending her rent money and her sick days on a last-minute trip to Prague. She can’t imagine doing whiskey shots with Villanelle as they pack up leftovers, not at all. The last time they drank together — well. It _could_ have been arsenic.

But they’re calling her flight for boarding, now, and Eve walks to the gate in something of a trance. She filters through couples, families, single travellers flying home for the holidays, and for the first time in a while, she feels her own lack keenly.

The flight drags on much longer than it apparently is. She stuffs in the complimentary earphones and tries to sleep, but whenever someone walks down the aisle it flashes through her eyelids and she feels that strobe-light chaos – following so closely, constant, encroaching. She feels strangely small strapped in her seat, bobbing atop the engine’s thrum, and at one point she jolts awake from a drowse convinced that she is much younger than she is, that she is alone on an international flight and there’s nobody waiting for her when she touches down.

She’s forty-four, she tells herself, scrunching her eyes shut again. But she didn’t tell Villanelle her flight time – nobody is waiting for her – and it’s true, she is alone.

Eve is reminded of how much she once enjoyed travelling alone.

There’s a quiet in it – or, there’s space for her head to be loud as it wants. No boundaries but language barriers and basic social conventions, no fitting herself around the jagged shapes of people who care about her, or try to. Nothing to navigate but her own body, which itself can be hard enough.

But then it was a honeymoon and their brief jaunts around Europe every few years. And then it was just Eve again, lacking in money or desire.

A person – any person – is a cut in the world, she thinks. And she _lets_ herself think these things, now, with Niko gone – these days, she just checks her hip on the corner of the TV stand, lies to her mother over the phone. She’s settled into it: just Eve. No _Polastri_.

But Villanelle –

And Eve is scared, by God, she is. She’s scared to her sick stomach and the jitter of her feet, she’s scared to the pits of her bed, so many miles away. It’s been so long, they each know too much – and Villanelle isn’t a cut but the knife itself.

Eve’s trying not to think about it.

She texted Villanelle to meet in the lobby of her hotel – Villanelle’s hotel, because Eve’s withholding that information out of some probably misplaced caution. Like Villanelle couldn’t find it if she set her mind to it. But it’s the principle of the thing, and so Eve sits in a leather armchair in the lobby of a very extravagant hotel and knocks her knees together over and over. The chair is low, too deep and too wide, and Eve feels the same dizzy sensation that overcame her on the plane – like she’s a child again, trying to walk in boots much too big for her.

Eve’s contemplating her feet and the angle of her knees, much too acute for comfort, when another pair of shoes joins them. Polished, pointed brogues wiggling a hello. She follows the feet, long legs sprouting, sharp woollen coat, and then – a smile perched atop it all like a light on a tree.

Eve feels suddenly ill with the reverse vertigo that comes with looking up the length of someone from so low on the ground. And because she has become so very good at not thinking very much at all, it is only now in face of the shock to the system that is Villanelle’s smile that Eve realises what it is she is doing.

To make a choice so resolutely – can you get any clearer than that? She turned her back, walked away, and that might sound symbolic if it weren’t so literal. Then to double back, folding over herself in the way Villanelle always expects of her.

Villanelle _knew_ Eve would come back to her. Yes, Eve can see it in the glint of her eyes, that knowledge may as well be carnal.

“Hello,” Villanelle says, and that knowledge is resting on her tongue, too; if Eve stood up now and looked it would be painted across Villanelle’s teeth, the back of her throat. All for Eve to inspect, for Eve to _know_ and now the cycle begins again.

And if she's been counting correctly, it's Eve's turn to get hurt.

“Hi,” says Eve, trying to convince herself that if she’s never run before, there cannot be a good reason to start now.

Villanelle twists her wrists, looking about them. “You like?”

Eve, quite honestly, has not paid attention to her surroundings. She clocked _bougie_ _Christmas_ upon walking in, but the rest was all feet-staring after that. She casts a cursory glance around now; her initial assessment was accurate enough. But Villanelle is waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” Eve says shortly.

Villanelle’s smile cuts wider, like she smells the lie.

Eve is tired of the world from this angle. She struggles to get up for a moment, with the chair so low to the ground, but ignores Villanelle’s offered hand.

“Come,” Villanelle says. “I want to show you around. The Christmas markets, I hear they are quaint.”

The market is anything but quaint.

Eve insists to herself that she has not walked into another realm; this is the very same world of her New Malden flat, her desk job, her sleepless nights. A wintry Prague evening and Villanelle leading her onward does nothing to change that base truth.

She catches the way Villanelle’s eyes dart about, that ingrained instinct watching for threats but also aroused by the spectacle. Eve would appreciate it, too, were she anybody else at any other time. And there is a lot of _it_ , crates upon crates upon stalls upon crowds of it. Gifts and baubles, things to hang and wear and hold, things that tinkle and wink in the breeze of passers-by.

It’s a scene, picture-perfect, and of course the food is a character in itself. They file past huge woks of potatoes, cooked all the ways and with all the spices. That sizzle-smell of charred meat and oily bread, the wobbling scent of mulled wine. Endless trinkets, flashes of colour that remind Eve of the lights outside her window back in London, although here the chaos is in sharper definition, piqued by the cold and the bump of Villanelle’s hip into her side.

Villanelle trots over to a stall selling woven rugs and tapestries, all warm, intricate patterns that look like they would feel nice between your toes. Eve follows but hangs back a little as Villanelle chats with the shopkeeper in slow but seemingly capable Czech.

Eve isn’t interested in the rugs. To be frank, she’s not so interested in this place at all; she’s interested in sitting Villanelle down somewhere quiet and doing twenty questions – maybe fifty, a hundred questions – until she can fit her disobedient head around what it means for them to be in the same space. So when the shopkeeper turns to serve another customer, Eve shuffles up next to Villanelle and tries to shrug on casual, ordinary, when she asks, “So, what have you been doing?”

Villanelle rubs one of the hanging rugs between her fingers, eyeing it in that judgemental way that can only come with a wallet full of money and the carelessness to spend it. “This and that,” she replies. “Odd jobs.”

“Like...” Eve darts her gaze around – usually they have no difficulty talking about, well, murder, but then it’s unusual for them to be in public. Just another thing to navigate, always another path to plot. Eve is weary; she needs a fucking map. “The same kind of jobs? As you used to take.”

“No. I don’t – no. None of that, not anymore.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They’ve moved onto another stall now, one stocked with wooden toys that all look hand-carved, perhaps by the small man standing at the centre of it in a ring of primary-coloured faces.

This feels like a date. Is Eve mad? No, wrong question, just _how_ insane is she? _Fuck_. What to say? What to do with her legs, her hands, is there even a safe place to rest her eyes?

As she’s grappling with this, Villanelle takes her hand.

Which is just – okay.

Villanelle points at a small doll, like a nutcracker soldier with clunky stringed joints, but this one has black hair and a pink dress and beady little eyes. “Hey,” she says. “It looks like you.”

Eve suddenly wants to disappear, she would very much like to not be here. What did she expect? Perhaps for Villanelle to immediately ask her up to her hotel room, or maybe to a drink at the bar first, or dinner, but all roads would lead to a stiff elevator ride and one or the other of them pressed against the back of a door, pinned there by a knee or an elbow. Maybe that’s where tonight is leading, too, but if so it’s taking a meandering path.

Instead, she is here in this postcard Christmas wonderland with a woman on her arm – and not just any woman, either. Darting through crowds, through chatter and laughter and snippets of carols rendered in warbling brass. Inhaling sugar-scented air and letting her hand hang loose in Villanelle’s like a nervous teenager.

It’s the panic that comes with _expectation_ , that’s the problem, rising in her chest like oil on water. These perfect, golden things like Christmas lights and snow-white Prague and quaint little market stalls and Villanelle’s fingers curling around Eve’s wrist – and the instinct is to toss them away. Rend deep, screeching holes through them, quickly, _quickly_. Before they rot her teeth, before the _goodness_ starts to hurt.

“I am getting it,” Villanelle says conclusively, clutching the wooden toy. Oblivious.

Eve uses the matter of organising payment as an excuse to drop Villanelle’s hand, wiping her palm against her jeans, but once money has exchanged hands Villanelle somehow _finds_ it again. Eve thinks of a particularly handsy octopus. Villanelle seems, and this is both quite strange and something Eve should have expected, like she’s trying way too hard.

“Uh,” Eve says, all of a sentiment. “Villanelle?”

“Mmm. Would you like some mulled wine? I don’t, but can I have a sip of yours?”

“Sure, um. Thanks,” Eve offers as they join the line before the serving cart. Neither of them are wearing gloves, and Eve’s palm is sweating profusely – surely Villanelle’s noticed? “Can I ask – why’d you leave the note?”

Villanelle’s looking up. Eve can’t tell if she’s still caught in wonder at their surroundings – it started to snow just a minute ago, ever so slightly, tiny flakes against the black – or if she’s really just avoiding Eve’s eye. “Just in case,” Villanelle says.

“Of what?”

“Insurance. Change of mind, you know. Like, what is it? A returns policy.”

“But,” Eve says, “you _knew_ , somehow, didn’t you? You knew that I’d…”

“I don’t know anything. I hoped, sure. Wondered, yes, maybe.”

Eve opens her mouth to say something else, but then a plastic cup is shoved into her free hand, dark liquid slopping over the side and onto Eve’s fingers. She follows Villanelle, dragged along by that octopus-grip, staring down into the drink and holding back a sneeze as the spices assault her nose.

They pause where the crowd lulls, spacing around a woman who pipes out something that might be Jingle Bell Rock on a flute. Eve is struck with dizziness yet again, a tilting moment too aware of the feel of her own body but almost from afar, thinking just a step to the left of where her brain is. She remembers the wine and takes a gulp that threatens to choke her, then another, but she’s thinking she wants to be drunker than this one drink can hope to achieve.

Villanelle gets in her view, all long limbs, and tilts her chin. “Can I have a sip?”

“Oh,” Eve says, shaking her hand out of Villanelle’s grip – a relief, really – so she can hand her the cup. “Here.”

But Villanelle chases that hand and grasps it again, then brandishes that stupid toy in her other hand. “You do it. I have my hands full.”

“What? I’ll spill it.”

“You’d better not. This coat is – “

“Worth my whole paycheck,” Eve sighs. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Quick. It’ll get cold.”

Vertigo strikes a third time – a charm – when Eve touches the cup to Villanelle’s lips. It’s a slow, removed moment – will they ever look away? The cold peels them open, but it’s tempered by a dozen different strains of sticky, dizzying heat. Eve thinks, _really? After all of this?_

Eve blinks. Villanelle smacks her lips. Eve tugs her hand out of Villanelle’s grip.

“Hold on,” she says, looking around. She takes a step in one direction, then two in another. “I need to…“

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Eve shakes her head and her hands, wishing she was back in her flat, tucked into bed with the covers over her eyes. “I just – I need some air, I’m gonna…”

There is a side street just there, between those two stalls. Eve slips down it and sighs gratefully as the world fades away.

They walk only a short distance – Eve leading with wide, determined steps – before the cramped buildings open up into a small park. The open air is colder, the grass frosted over and the fountain in the centre of it is little more than an icy slab of concrete. It’s almost morose, here, the way winter has taken root. But it’s also empty, quiet, monotone. Eve breathes out.

She sits on the side of the fountain, spidering her hands across the freezing concrete, before Villanelle catches up.

“This is nice,” observes Villanelle, rather falsely.

Eve’s head swims. In the interests of finding solid ground, she asks, “What did you say you were doing now, again?”

“Oh, that? I’ve gone back to freelance – it’s mostly, like, white-collar fraud. Though I got to steal a _painting_ , the other day, that was new. And fun. I've always said I'd be a good spy, I have transferable skills. But I don’t...do it anymore. The killing people.”

“Is that good?”

“I was going to ask you that,” replies Villanelle.

“I guess it is.”

“I guess so, too.”

Awkward, again. Eve usually pushes through moments like this – or doesn’t notice them – but now she feels it keenly. She could stay and see how the moment resolves itself, but right now she’d rather – God – just fall in this fountain and freeze right over.

“What is this?” Villanelle asks, frowning at Eve.

“What?”

“This…around your mouth. It’s the wine?”

“Oh. Uh, guess so. I’m not good at…not being messy. Or, I’m good at being messy,” Eve explains. “Um.”

“It’s okay.” Villanelle licks her thumb – why? – and tucks one knee up on the seat beside Eve, leering too close for Eve’s current idea of comfort. “I’ll help.”

And then Villanelle has pulled herself flush atop Eve’s lap, just like that, and after the initial shock and the rush in her belly, Eve thinks: _definitely trying too hard_. But she thinks little else, how could she? That thumb is below her mouth, wet and pressing, and Villanelle’s knees on either side of Eve’s hips and her thighs are _right there_ and her hand and her eyes and –

Fuck. She’s just listing body parts. As if she’s not fully aware of all of them, yes _including_ the ones she can’t really see right now beneath Villanelle’s coat.

Eve’s stomach does fucking _loops_ – she might be sick, she might vomit, she might do something much, much worse than simply spewing over the both of them, and in her panic she searches for something to hold onto and finds only…ah. Villanelle’s eyes snap to hers as soon as Eve’s hands fall upon Villanelle’s thighs. Eve retracts the move immediately, leaving her fists to hover vaguely in the air, clenching, unclenching.

“Uh,” Eve says. It’s now that she finally finds the wherewithal to jerk back from Villanelle’s touch and then shuffle awkwardly out from underneath her, so they both stumble and have to catch themselves against the side of the fountain. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

The same heat in her cheeks, the same burn of bile in her throat — it spills out Eve's mouth: “Villanelle, _what_?”

Villanelle recovers her balance more graciously than Eve managed. She curls upright, shoving her hands in her pockets and cocking her head slightly.

“I don’t know what you – what you think – I mean – I’m not – I’m not your _girlfriend_ ,” Eve says, spitting out the sour taste on her tongue.

Villanelle she lifts her boot and scuffs the heel noisily against the pavement. Shrugs. “I thought we could be.”

“We – Villanelle, we _never_. We were never going to be – that’s not what – I never – “

“You never?”

Suddenly Eve can’t take the way Villanelle stands, the way she looks, moves or doesn’t move – the way she _is_ , and isn’t Eve just the most hateful…if even the cut of Villanelle’s coat and the wispy hair at her temples makes her want to scream and rip something apart.

Villanelle takes a step closer, then back again. She says, “Eve.” She says, “I don’t want to mess up. Not like last time.”

It hits Eve, then, what’s so wickedly familiar about tonight. The gentle ease of Villanelle’s touch. The dread creeping up the back of Eve’s throat. The two of them wandering about an old city that, so shared, feels oddly new. All that’s missing: an axe, a body, a gun.

“I thought you would like Prague,” Villanelle says, and Eve fails to see the relevance. “People say it’s pretty. It has character. I think neither – it is boring most of the time. But it likes Christmas, don’t you think?” She swallows awkwardly, then presses on: “I’ve been here since October. It was like I woke up and suddenly it was pretending to be a fairy tale, it’s funny. But it’s ugly beneath.”

Villanelle takes that aborted step now, and tilts her head back in the direction they came from, the crowded market square. “I can point out the ugly bits, if you want? You’ll like it.”

Eve looks at her – not her hands, her feet, not the black sky – and wonders how she ever said no. No in her kitchen, no in Paris, then no at her own home again, no after no until Rome; how did she ever have the strength, the will?

But when, she has to ask, was anything ever fixed by holding hands?

“You told me you wanted it to stop,” Villanelle continues. “So do I. This…” She spreads a hand flat and wide, tilted towards Eve. “This is not stopping. This is making it worse.”

Eve shakes her head, scrunching up her face against the cold air. “Then why invite me?”

“Because you aren’t the problem. We aren’t the problem. I think _this_ ,” she stresses the word again, shrugging her shoulders in frustration, “is the problem. You know?”

No. Eve doesn’t know. What she _knows_ is that Villanelle has her dangling on a string, and this has proven it: Eve Polastri, made a decision then reneged on it, flew across the continent for it, tangled in a stranglehold. What she _knows_ is…sweaty palms, the restless shuffle of her feet. A voice that says _cut the cord_.

“Why,” Eve asks deliberately, “did you leave the note, Villanelle?”

Villanelle presses her lips together in a twisted grimace. “I told you. It was a just in case.”

“Just in case I – what? Just in case I was as weak as you thought?”

“No, Eve – “

But Eve can’t hear it. She cuts across, “I can’t _do it_ again.” Panic wells in her chest; she might drop through the floor, disappear. Or, worse, the opposite – worse, she might feel it all at once. “I can’t do it again. Not this – whatever you do, this tugging me around, leaving me stupid clues, flying across the continent for you. _Manipulating_ me. You shot me! Remember? – I won’t do it. Not this. No.”

And Eve’s just flinging out words now, hurling them and hoping they’re sharp enough, hoping they don’t hit bone. She says, “I’m leaving you.” And she meant to say just _I’m leaving_ , no _you_ , but that’s how it comes out and now they both have to sit with it.

She forces herself to look Villanelle in the eye, to witness the cruel way her mouth twists, the cold cut of her eyes. What Villanelle says, though, is, “Maybe that’s for the best.”

Eve opens her mouth again to snap something – what? Hasn’t the world heard enough of her? So she closes it. Her brain stops, starts again, turning over like a faulty engine. When was it that she last thought in a straight, logical line that anyone could follow? And of course it was Villanelle emerging from the murk, Eve’s one true touchstone. It’s insulting. It’s digging her own grave. It's a waste. She should never have come.

But – Villanelle looks pretty, when she cries.

And that’s that. Maybe it was what Eve really needed – a jumping-off point, something to push against to propel herself away, floating in space. She never uses the hotel room she booked, but goes straight to the airport and naps in the lounge until they call the next flight back to London. She sleeps on the plane, too, but it’s jagged. Fragments of light, dark, the filmy orange backs of her eyelids.

It’s that last picture of Villanelle as she left her – so many lasts, how is it even possible – that Eve dreams about. Or maybe those are just memories, it’s hard to tell the difference lately.

The man seated next to her jostles her awake as he steps over her out to the aisle, and it’s not the movement but his closeness that shocks her. She digs her fingers into her knees and pretends to still be asleep, pretends she can’t feel the echo of a touch – thick jeans, someone else’s thighs, someone she should have left dead.

Eve declined the offered champagne at the start of the flight, though it was complimentary. If she’s learned any lesson at all it’s that she can’t be stuffed full of anything, no matter what she shoves in there or how hard she tries. It’s better to embrace that. It’s better to let the message sink in.

If she wakes the next morning with bleary eyes and a poisonous prickle in her jaw…so what? That’s grieving. That’s acceptance. That’s giving into the surest thing she’s ever felt – the twisted, rotting _infection_ of it – and not letting it own her. That’s totally what she’s doing: cold turkey, head it off at the pass, cut it off at the spinal cord. It sounds great when she says it like that.

She gets a better job within a week, starts saving for a better flat. Starts saving for some thicker curtains, first, but it’ll be new year’s by the time she can afford them. She tucks away the money anyway, just to feel like she’s doing something. She has plans. She has visions for her future, even if they involve little more than a good night’s sleep.

Being alone is – safe. Solid ground. She thinks about getting away for Christmas – travelling solo, like in her college days. She never consciously decides against it, but she never plans it, so it doesn’t happen.

That’s the thing about sickness, though. It’s deceiving, it rots you while your head’s turned. It gets Eve in the morning, blinking at 6am blackness and tasting musty air. It gets her in the minutes she waits for the shower to run hot, it gets her in between email notifications, it gets her over the porridge she doesn't eat and in the sway of the underground. And in the early-onset evenings it leeches out to hold her head in place and peel her eyes wide open.

And December aches onward, less of a month and more of a feral, festering miasma. Each night, every night – perhaps forever – Eve stares at the carnival of lights cast through her window and only just keeps her head.

She is doing better.

It’s hardly surprising, then, abrupt as it is, that Villanelle returns the favour.

Just another morning, like all the rest but the chill might bite a little harder, the kettle might take a little longer to boil and the shower flashes between hot and cold. Stepping outside her flat is like plunging into a walk-in freezer, just as frosty, just as deadly if you leave your wits behind.

And Eve does leave her wits behind, because she freezes on the doorstep with the key still in the lock.

She finds she is unsurprised to see Villanelle there, perched atop the railing that spirals down the interior staircase. Kicking her legs and grinning dangerously. Yes, that’s Villanelle if ever Eve saw her.

Eve gathers herself – a feat, to be sure, as pieces do tend to fall off, sometimes get stuck beneath furniture – and growls, “Rack off.”

“Rack off?” Villanelle parrots back, curling her lip. “Mm. Delightful language.”

Villanelle looks – wow. Gone are the thick coat and jeans she wore in Prague, which Eve suspects was part of the ploy anyway. Today she stuns in a suit of red-green tartan. Anyone else would look like a picnic blanket or a pair of bagpipes, but Villanelle just looks…like Villanelle.

Eve wishes she didn’t. She thinks, maybe, they might pretend to be other people for a while – maybe then it could work. For an hour, for a night, and that would be enough, right? Just enough to vaccinate her but not enough to foster an addiction. Whether Villanelle is drug or disease, Eve has never been able to tell.

Eve says, “I mean it.” She does. She’s as sure of this as she is of anything, these days. To be fair, that’s a low bar.

Villanelle’s suit is matched with a pair of shiny boots, which Villanelle tangles around the bars, a picture of no concern. “I am sure you do.” Then: “It’s Christmas,” she says, like it means something.

“Yeah, great,” says Eve.

Villanelle pushes herself off the railing and lands with a thump. “It’s Christmas _Day_ , Eve.”

“Is it?” Not that it matters. The day of the year does nothing to alter Eve’s plans to take a trip to the corner shop (for all the usual vices), returning in time for midday television and boring a hole in the couch. A condign punishment for one such as her.

Villanelle tilts her head meaningfully – it’s tucked inside a dark knit cap, so Villanelle looks both undeniably cute and a second away from robbing a bank. Only Villanelle could hold onto such contradictions, or such absurdities, like the question she asks next: “So are you going to invite me in for dinner?”

Eve almost drops her keys. “ _What_?”

“Christmas dinner. That’s what you call _lunch_ , yes? Makes no sense, but I am willing to participate.

“Why would I – no? _No_.”

But either Eve is hiding a _yes_ somewhere deep, or Villanelle wrenches it out of her. Mostly, the idea that she might lock Villanelle out in the cold on Christmas Day appeals to her very last shred of decency.

Though that’s decency Villanelle is sure to exploit over their hot roast dinner. As expected, Villanelle refuses to come within five feet of a microwave meal, and – on the basis of several brazen assumptions – ordered delivery ahead of time.

And Eve won’t pretend she isn’t grateful, but…

“You don’t have a tree, Eve,” is what Villanelle says first when they are seated at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Déjà vu hits but at least it’s not dizzying, this time.

Eve strains her eyes rolling them. “Why the fuck would I have a tree? My parents were Buddhist.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

Eve sighs. _Fine_. “We did have a tree though, when I was a kid. And Niko was into it. But not much point if it’s just for me.”

“Right.” Villanelle nods, scooping a forkful of truffled mashed potato into her mouth. It’s not Eve’s usual Christmas fare – it’s a bit of an Anglo-Christian stereotype, really, turkey and all, but it tastes expensive. Eve chokes it down.

Muffled chewing sounds, the clinking of forks; all a sparse soundtrack to Eve's current task: trying not to look at Villanelle. At least, not when Villanelle is looking back. The result is a true-life game of Battleship — Villanelle is playing a different kind of game, must be, but Eve can't be sure what.

Until Villanelle has scraped her plate clean and Eve has managed at least a few bites, when Villanelle says to her cutlery, “I have a gift.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It’s okay if you don’t have one for me, I understand.”

“Yeah, I don’t.”

And Villanelle has the audacity to look disappointed. She’s slipped off her cap, so her hair is mussed. It’s…cute, Eve guesses, though it’s hard to really tell.

“Okay,” Villanelle says, “this is for you. Close your eyes.”

“So you can shoot me in the face this time? No thanks.”

“No. No shooting. Please, don’t – it’s not a funny joke.”

And Villanelle might be trying on her new kicked-puppy persona, but Eve is having a bad day. Week. Year. She deadpans, “I wasn’t actually joking.”

“Fine. Close your eyes for me, please.”

And Eve does. Maybe it was the _for me_.

She hears the chair scrape against the floor as Villanelle shuffles around the table. Her voice is close: “Hand out.”

Eve puts out her hand with a forced sigh and Villanelle takes it, cradling the back of Eve’s hand with her own. Something smooth presses into Eve’s palm.

It’s the stupid toy Villanelle bought back in Prague, at the market – “I didn’t tell you to open your eyes yet!” – and looking down at it turns Eve’s stomach.

It’s all been very strange, since the evening on Tower Bridge or perhaps before, and it’s strange now. Because this isn’t an expensive perfume or a suitcase full of clothes or a razor-blade lipstick. It’s handmade. It’s not useful or beautiful. It’s tacky, try-hard. And contrary to what Villanelle said, it doesn’t look like Eve at all: the hair is too long, the eyes too blue, and she hasn’t worn pink since she was in high school.

Eve shakes her head at it – at all of it. “What’s this – really? You couldn’t tell I hated this thing?”

“That’s not the gift. Well, it is a gift, but it’s not _the_ gift.”

“What’s the gift?”

Villanelle raises her eyebrows at Eve pointedly, then jiggles their joined hands.

Oh, no. She has to be kidding. “Uh uh. You’re not telling me your gift to me is _you_ , that’s bullshit. I hate movies like that.”

“Not _me_ ,” Villanelle says. “Well, only a little bit. I could be anyone, couldn’t I? And I would not have come if I knew you were spending Christmas with…anybody.”

“Oh. You mean – “

“It’s okay, Eve. I know you don’t like to talk about these things. It is…fine. We can pretend the toy is my present, which you hate, and so you have an excuse to hate me again too, and it’s all very silly and you can think about stabbing me with that dinner knife all you – “

Eve can’t remember _deciding_ to do it, but she was definitely thinking along the lines of _shut the hell up_ and maybe she couldn’t figure out another way to do it because – well, Villanelle’s lips are very soft, anyway, and she makes this muffled noise in her surprise that strikes down Eve’s sternum; the kiss isn’t bad, is the long and the short of it. More like the long of it, though, as Eve can’t think of a good reason to pull away.

That’s a lie. There are many good reasons, proliferating in long ordered lists in her head but you know what? Ruin doesn’t sound so bad right now. It’s better than nothing.

Villanelle makes that noise again – more urgent, almost a whimper – and it pulls Eve back to earth enough to realise how tightly she’s gripping the front of Villanelle’s shirt, straining the collar against her neck. She lets go.

“Hey,” says Villanelle quickly, grabbing Eve’s wrist as she leans back. She guides Eve’s hand, curling her fingers so they fist in the fabric just above the jut of muscle that curves from Villanelle’s throat to her shoulder.

Villanelle shuffles forward, advising firmly, “You will need to hold on.”

It’s later – impossibly later, Eve doesn’t think they’ve ever managed to be in the same room together for longer than an hour. It’s been…well, more than an hour. It’s dead quiet outside. Quiet except for the Christmas lights, which are anything but – no sound but colour, violent in their vibrance.

She’s listening to Villanelle breathe. Slow but lopsided, an awake kind of breathing. Eve hears in the bellows of it an _I hear you, too; I am listening_.

That’s the problem, she can’t think of what to say. Doesn’t know if she should, or has to, or wants to say anything – what _does_ she know? She knows the ache between her legs, wrung-out and dull. She knows the heavy heat of the air, sweat sticking skin together. Her arm sizzles with pins-and-needles, that’s knowledge too, but the notion that the loss of feeling is caused by the other body lying on top of it is merely conjecture.

That Eve is no longer just Eve – that she is here with another, sharing space, sharing air – seems a terrifying, legless assumption.

 _What are you thinking?_ The essential post-coital question, though it’s something she'd never ask herself about Niko. You can love someone without caring so much what’s in their head, right? And vice versa.

Villanelle shifts. Red-green light tracks across her breasts and the side of her face, and Eve follows it.

This is starting to get old very, very fast. She won't sleep — does she ever — so now what? Another round? She wouldn't mind that, anything but this: _existing_. Feeling her way around the cavern that is another person's stillness. Eve clenches her hands into fists, but the memory of Villanelle’s hips still burns into them like a brand.

Has there ever been anything like them? _I killed you, you killed me_. Defying not fate but each other to be here. It's so — vast, surely unnavigable. She's wary of moving even an inch, because if she does the both of them will hear skin peeling again skin. She can't move. Can't speak. These are the rules.

And she has made a terrible, damning mistake.

Eve’s breath shorts, throat constricts; every bit of her shrinking ‘til she feels small again, young, easily crushed beneath a feather’s weight.

She’s going to die. She’s going to fall asleep and never wake up. She’s –

“I like the lights,” says Villanelle suddenly, and Eve breathes out.

Eve couldn’t disagree more. But she presses her face into the back of Villanelle’s neck, smells stale sweat, and it’s dark there. Suffocating.

“I hate them,” Eve mumbles around a mouthful of Villanelle's hair.

A touch shocks Eve, fingers brushing against her cheek as Villanelle reaches awkwardly back. “You see?” Villanelle says into the empty space before her. “We are the same.”

“Right,” says Eve, and then adds sarcastically: “We're made for each other.”

“We’re made for each other,” Villanelle repeats, mulling over the words. And on her lips they don't sound sarcastic at all, but reverent. Like a wish. “Goodnight, Eve.”

Eve can't see sleep coming for either of them, peace neither, but it's late, it's Christmas, and she thinks – whatever. Whichever one of them is lying, let them sleep with it.

**Author's Note:**

> i was weirdly nervous to post this. it's a bit Off, i guess? i find eve pov difficult, but i think those difficulties are essential to her. it's a whole thing. anyway, have a good one :)


End file.
